He intentionally left gaps between the already discovered elements, so that later on those gaps would be filled with new elements that he knew existed, but haven’t been discovered yet. How did he know that?
In: Chemistry
Imagine for a moment that we haven’t discovered all the numbers yet.
We know there’s: …..12, 13, 14, 15, 16…..
We know there’s …..22, 23, 24, 25, 26…….
We know there’s ….32, 33, 34, (is there something here?), 36….
We know there’s…..42, 43, 44, 45, 46…..
Based on the clearly established patterns before and after, we can make a very confident assumption that there’s a “35” in existence that we just haven’t found yet. We leave a gap to account for this extremely likely possibility that someone in the future will discover this “35” number.
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